Tag: operations research

The 2017 edition of SAS Global Forum, the largest annual SAS user group meeting, will be held at the Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Florida on April 2-5. Among the many analytic talks at SAS Global Forum 2017, several focus on operations research topics like optimization and simulation. If

There has been a lot of speculation over the years about the quality of the optimization solvers in SAS/OR, in particular the mixed integer linear optimization (MILP) solver. Measuring the performance of optimization solvers and comparing different solvers on a test set is a crucial part of modern optimization solver development.

In honor of today’s #GivingTuesday, which "harnesses the potential of social media and the generosity of people around the world to bring about real change in their communities,” I’ve been thinking about what constitutes “real change” and the role analytics can play on the many social issues our planet faces.

The 2016 INFORMS Annual Meeting will be held at the Music City Center and Omni Nashville Hotel in downtown Nashville, TN on November 13-16, with pre-conference events starting on Saturday, November 12. SAS will be a major participant in this conference. Over two dozen people from SAS will attend, with

Analytics Experience 2016 will be held on Sept. 12-14, 2016 at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, NV. There will be a great number of excellent talks and demonstrations at the conference, covering many aspects of SAS analytics and many practical applications. Several of these sessions deal directly with the use

In 1967, just a short time before a group of graduate students at North Carolina State University (NCSU) were starting a software company they called SAS, Dr. Salah Elmaghraby joined the faculty of NCSU as a Distinguished University Professor. In the 1970s, Dr. Elmaghraby led the effort to create one

At the most recent SAS Global Forum in Las Vegas, I gave a demo on using SAS/OR to compute an optimal strategy for the casino game blackjack. For anyone who wasn't able to attend, I'd like to show some of the code and results here.

SAS will have a major presence at the 2016 INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research, which will be held at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress hotel in Orlando, FL on April 10-12. Many SAS staff will participate in this conference. SAS/OR, the SAS Global Academic Program, and JMP

Here's a golf puzzle from Sam Loyd: Everybody is playing golf now, and even the lazy ones who a few weeks ago declared how much pleasanter it was to swing in a shady hammock, have caught the golf fever and are chasing the ball around the golf links. I am

Super Bowl 50 (L?) is this Sunday, so it's time for another (American) football-related post. Steven Miller, a mathematics professor at Rutgers University, recently noted that the 2015 NFL schedule allowed a competitive advantage for some teams (including the Carolina Panthers). This figure he generated displays the 2015 regular season

The British spy agency GCHQ recently posted a grid-shading puzzle that the director sent out in his Christmas cards this year. The puzzle, shown here, is known as a nonogram and by various other names, including Paint by Numbers and FigurePic: Each cell is to be colored black or white,

The INFORMS 2015 Annual Meeting will be held in Philadelphia November 1-4. More than two dozen SAS staff will participate, and SAS will have three adjacent booths representing SAS/OR (and all of Advanced Analytics), JMP, and the SAS Global Academic Program. SAS is well-represented among the presentations at this meeting,

In a previous post, I discussed using discrete-event simulation to validate an optimization model and its underlying assumptions. A similar approach can be used to validate queueing models as well. And when it is found that the assumptions required for a queueing model are not a good fit for the

SAS/OR 14.1, which became available on July 14, delivers a number of new and enhanced features in optimization and simulation. These changes are designed to make SAS/OR even easier to use and to enable you to model and solve larger, more complex problems more efficiently. If you're using SAS/OR now,

During the week of July 13-17, 2015 most optimization experts will attend the 22nd International Symposium on Mathematical Programming (ISMP2015), which is this year's most important optimization conference. Several members of the SAS/OR team will attend. We will give various talks during the week, here is our schedule.

In 2013, Rick Wicklin blogged about visualizing matrices as heat maps using SAS/IML. That post reminded me that we had done a similar thing for the coefficient matrices in our optimization problems. In particular, we have developed some SAS macros to visualize the input data sets for the OPTLP (linear

Good Old Country-Style Optimization In an odd way, Imre Polik's recent post, How to solve puzzles? Peg solitaire with optimization, reminded me of one more reason why I like to eat at Cracker Barrel, an American chain of country-style restaurants.

The primary objective of many discrete-event simulation projects is system investigation. Output data from the simulation model are used to better understand the operation of the system (whether that system is real or theoretical), as well as to conduct various "what-if"-type analyses. However, I recently worked on another model

In the traveling salesman problem (TSP), a salesman must minimize travel distance while visiting each of a given set of cities exactly once. Recently, the TSP has generated some buzz in the popular media, after a blog post by Randy Olson. The tour shown was not quite optimal, and Bill

Peg solitaire I love puzzles; I have a few of them in my office. I regularly use them at interviews: I ask the candidate either to solve a puzzle or to devise a (clever) mathematical algorithm that solves it. I'm sure a lot of readers are familiar with the standard

♦We learned this week that SAS is ranked #4 on Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2015. This makes six straight years ranking in the top four (including twice at #1). ♦The March/April 2015 issue of Analytics Magazine includes a SAS company profile by my colleague Kathy Lange. As

Suppose someone needs a kidney transplant and a family member is willing to donate one. If the donor and recipient are incompatible (because of blood types, tissue mismatch, and so on), the transplant cannot happen. Now suppose two donor-recipient pairs A and B are in this situation, but donor A

It is January. In the United States, this means NFL playoff time! A perfect time (if you are a geeky SAS/OR guy) to use PROC OPTGRAPH to rank the best teams in the NFL. Ranking Sports Teams Ranking of sports teams is a popular (and controversial) topic, especially in the

Just yesterday, Santa called my cell phone asking for a favor... Yes, Santa has my direct line, and I owe him (he once did me a solid, back in 1984, for Christmas, scoring me an awesome Optimus Prime Transformer). That's me there in the front - sporting plaid duds and

The 2014 INFORMS Annual Conference in San Francisco was quite a success. Record attendance, diverse program, great city, lovely weather: who can ask for more? SAS and, in particular, SAS/OR was well-represented with a number of talks in all areas of operations research. Here is a somewhat arbitrary selection, please click

Do you have an Uncle Louie? Yep - we all do! You know what I mean - this guy: When my wife and I were planning to get married, we had all sorts of big decisions to make. Where would our future home be? How many kids would we have?

The INFORMS 2014 Annual Meeting will be held In San Francisco from November 9-12; conference hotels are the Hilton San Francisco and the Parc 55 Wyndham. More than 35 SAS staff will participate, and SAS will have three adjacent booths representing SAS/OR (and all of Advanced Analytics), JMP, and the SAS

Welcome to the blog “Operations Research with SAS: Optimize, Simulate, Understand.” For those of you without an operations research background, a brief explanation: operations research (OR) is the study of the operations of systems, with a focus on making them function more efficiently and more effectively. The overall goal of